Here’s Roisin Shortall on Marion Finucane’s radio programme. Listen as she tries to be polite, answering the questions that would reduce substantial political differences to gossip about personal relationships.

Here are a couple of quotations from Roisin’s interview. a) “I don’t believe he [Minister Reilly] subscribes to the Programme for Government”. b) There were fundamental differences in relation to the policy area and the way the health service was to develop.”

Media coverage since the resignation has tended to depoliticise the controversy. From the outset it was clear that there was a very basic political difference over the importance of deprivation as a criterion for deciding the allocation of state resources. However, media workers decided that they would ignore the obvious and frame the resignation in a quite different way. The “story” was made to conform to media orthodoxy: that politics is about personal relations and venal ambitions, and the “good guys” are those who oppose the “political class” and make them occasionally “U turn”. Not only does this work to position the worst journalists as among the “good guys” but it is essentially conservative, in the literal sense that it opposes change.

It now emerges that the resignation is a defence of the Labour elements in the Programme for Government and about the choice of whether left or right wing political policies will shape a new health service.

It is very damaging to public political discourse when journalists positively strive to descend to gossip with the likes of, “Yes, yes, but what did he say to you at the meeting?” or “Did you ever talk over a drink?” or “Do you feel let down?” Citizens eager to engage with controversies affecting the shape of the republic deserve better – much better.